Girls & Boys (Oberon Modern Plays): A Play

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Whether seeing it for the first time, or revisiting, you won’t want to miss this return season of the unanimously praised, breakout hit of the 2022 Adelaide Festival. The play was finished long before the Weinstein scandal broke, and Kelly hasn’t changed anything in response, but he sees the sexual harassment of women as part of the same problem of patriarchy and male violence. “Early drafts were much more didactic, and there were loads of statistics about sexual assault, which is about one in five women. If that happened to men it would be something we would sort out, but we don’t. For years we’ve gone, ‘Oh that’s just the way the world is, and men behave badly.’ We often don’t even talk about it. It’s just been part of the wallpaper. Maybe as a result of Weinstein and #MeToo we are at last looking at the wallpaper, and going, ‘That’s enough.’” Book Genre: British Literature, Contemporary, Dark, Drama, European Literature, Feminism, Fiction, Plays, Short Stories, Theatre Facing up to what he has written can be a challenge for Kelly. He recently saw a “really good” French production of his play Girls and Boys (a one-hander performed in Britain in 2018 by Carey Mulligan), he tells me, but confesses: “I don’t know if I can ever see that again. I mean, I’ve got a two-and-a-half-year-old now.” Infanticide is at the heart of the play. “I’m glad I wrote it, but I probably couldn’t do it now. I just can’t let my mind go to those places.” He notes, though, that this is the reason why he hasn’t allowed anyone to revive After the End in Britain for many years. “I’ve seen versions where I felt really f***ing uncomfortable, witnessing what we’re witnessing, because it feels abusive to the actor. I definitely stand by the production we did that Roxana [Silbert] directed [at the Bush Theatre in London in 2005], because I thought it was done sensitively… as someone who’s put audiences through quite a lot.” Kelly co-wrote the sitcom Pulling with Sharon Horgan (above, left) (Photo: BBC)

I met my husband in the queue to board an easyJet flight and I have to say I took an instant dislike to the man.” An unexpected meeting at an airport leads to an intense, passionate, head-over-heels relationship. Before long they begin to settle down, buy a house, juggle careers, have kids – theirs is an ordinary family. But then their world starts to unravel and things take a disturbing turn. A tragic, violent look at parenthood and trauma. Girls and Boys by Dennis Kelly – eBook Details It feels impossible not to discuss the violence because it is the fulcrum around which the play turns. Girls & Boys is, for the most part, a funny, brutally honest tale of a love affair turning sour told by a tough, talented and downright hilarious woman. But the shadow cast by this one act is so long, so dark, it cannot be ignored. What the woman has to say in her blue-box monologues isn’t very scintillating or clever, which may lead you to wonder if the children, whom we never see, are real or imaginary. An upstage door does open and shut when we’re told the little girl is going to her bedroom. This macabre wonderment on our part makes the monologues easier to endure. The other thing that piques interest is how much the woman prefers her daughter to her son. She meets him in an airport queue and sparks fly. Their passionate love affair takes them to marriage, a mortgage, and children – an ordinary family life. Her natural working-class wit works to her advantage, and she unexpectedly starts rising above her allotted rung on the British social

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The script includes a graphic rape scene, which Kelly is at pains to point out does not have to be performed verbatim on stage. I mention actor-turned-film-director Romola Garai’s recent remark that “I don’t think anybody needs to see a rape on-screen ever again”. “I totally understand that sentiment,” he says, “but I just think if you start ring-fencing areas that are out of bounds, what are we stopping in the future?” Look, I think I probably was at one stage,” Kelly says. “I think a lot of people could [have been]. I was a f***ing weird little kid who couldn’t connect with people. I just found alcohol and that sort of got me through.”

An unexpected meeting at an airport leads to an intense, passionate, head-over-heels relationship. Before long they begin to settle down, buy a house, juggle careers, have kids – theirs is an ordinary family. But then their world starts to unravel and things take a disturbing turn. Carey Mulligan's performance, first and foremost, was unbelievable. This isn't an audiobook but rather a beautifully acted monologue. I'm not sure any other actor could have really pulled this off. Mulligan has performed "Girls & Boys" in front of audiences, and I'm sure that's fantastic, but not having seen it it's hard to say what you miss out on by just listening to it. The innocent sounding Girls & Boys is a searing one-woman show by Dennis Kelly, the celebrated wordsmith of in-yer-face classics like Osama the Hero and DNA, as well as the masterful dialogue for Tim Minchin’s Matilda. A high-wire act balancing comedy and drama which has stunned audiences in London and New York, its stellar solo role is brilliantly filled here by Justine Clarke, whose versatility has seen her adored by audiences for her work on Play School to ARIA Award-winning albums and darker, powerhouse turns in Love My Way, Tangle and Look Both Ways.

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It’s very easy to look at dolphins and go ‘they’re great’.” He pauses for dramatic effect. “But dolphins can be right c---s.” The 51-year-old has a frank, unfiltered way of delivering opinions that may owe something to his upbringing in a large family – he’s the middle child of five born to working-class Irish parents in north London. I’ve met people who have had terrible things happen to them almost on a par with this. What always impresses me is their ability to put one foot in front of the other. You’d think an unimaginable tragedy would make you curl up in a ball, but people don’t. They get up, they move and they continue.” There has always been a dark side to Kelly’s work, from his 2003 debut, Debris, which featured a DIY crucifixion, through to DNA (about teenagers killing a classmate) to Channel 4’s brutally explicit thriller Utopia. Even his family shows, Matilda and Pinocchio, have baleful undertones. In Girls and Boys, he considers the unthinkable: family annihilation. “It’s such an incomprehensible act, it makes no sense to wipe out the people you love or once loved deeply. But people do it, mostly men, and it’s on the rise.” Review: I never read or listen to a book twice, as I'm too scared of missing out on an amazing new read and I also worry that I may not enjoy a story as much the second time round. But I remember loving this one and I couldn't remember the ending so gave it another listen, and I'm so glad I did. This is my definitely my all-time favorite free audible original.

It is clear Kelly fervently believes in mankind despite the violence we’re capable of. He readily agrees. “There’s a tendency to think we’re awful,” he says. “When you watch Planet of the Apes nowadays the apes are the heroes because everyone thinks humans are f---ing awful. Avatar’s the same. But maybe if cows had intelligence they would have invented the internal combustion engine and messed up the climate. I saw how my feeling for the woman made a 180-degree turn. I come out of the reading thinking—don‘t ever, ever judge another person. One never knows what another has gone through. New York City offers plenty of excellent acting courses, but there is no finer master class currently available than the one being presented eight times a week at the Minetta Lane Theatre. It’s there that Carey Mulligan delivers an unforgettable performance in Dennis Kelly’s one-person play Girls & Boys. For anyone interested in the art of stage acting, attendance is mandatory.But there’s time for this story to sink it. It stays with you, just as urgent and chilling, even when you’d rather think easier, happier thoughts. The audiobook concludes with words spoken by Dennis Kelly. He tells us why he wrote the play and what he has attempted to achieve. What he says gives one food for thought. This is a drama monologue; one woman is speaking to us, to you and to me. What she is telling us is honest and true and upfront. She is speaking from her heart. The honesty is brutal. I'm not sure that I agree with all the conclusions that the author came to in this play. Some of it rings true, while other things are debatable. What I found absolutely brave was that Dennis Kelly had the nerve to ask those questions. The balls. Kelly won a Tony award for the original book of the musical (with Tim Minchin writing its memorable songs) and has written the screenplay for the much-anticipated Netflix adaptation, (due in December). “It’s been shot, it’s in the edit now,” he says. “I think it’s really good. It looks amazing, and it’s got a new song at the end that Tim’s written, which is just beautiful. Oddly, I think it feels more emotional than the stage show.”

The origins of the play are twofold. First, his ex-wife, Italian actor Monica Nappo, had asked him to write her a monologue and second, he heard the phrase “family annihilator” and couldn’t get it out of his head. “It’s such an awful thing,” he says. “The phrase feels so dark it almost doesn’t belong in this world.” Kelly, left, with Tim Minchin at the launch of the Netflix production of Matilda the Musical at the London Film Festival. Credit: Getty Images Girls & Boys marks the first collaboration between writer Dennis Kelly and director Lyndsey Turner. The innocent sounding Girls & Boys is a searing one- woman show by celebrated playwright Dennis Kelly. A high- wire act balancing comedy and drama, which has stunned audiences in London and New York, its stellar solo role is brilliantly filled here by Justine Clarke. The vast majority of murderers and sex offenders are men. We have to conclude that elements of masculinity are a problem for society. Dennis KellyFor the playwright, the act of murdering a family was a lens through which to examine the darker aspects of masculinity, a topic that in 2016 was on the cusp of being crystallised as a social movement. In one of the play’s key moments, the narrator posits the idea that “We didn’t create society for men, we created it to stop men.”